The most obvious and notable absence as the marathon elites gather in Back Bay this weekend will be that of two-time defending Boston Marathon champion Rita Jeptoo, whose doping bust last year rocked the distance running world.
Jeptoo has challenged the result of her out-of-competition positive last September for erythropoietin (EPO), long the choice of endurance athletes looking for an illicit edge. If her sanction from the Kenyan athletics federation is upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, she will lose her 2014 Chicago Marathon title and serve a two-year suspension.
But the damage is irreparable either way. Jeptoo's four major wins over the past two seasons -- two in Boston, two in Chicago -- and her 2006 Boston victory will forever be regarded as tarnished. The women who finished second to her were denied their moment in the spotlight. Jeptoo's course-record victory in Boston last year is now the lone blemish on an otherwise triumphant day for the sport and the city a year after the finish-line bombings. The Kenyan was days away from collecting a $500,000 bonus for the World Marathon Majors series title last fall when the test result was revealed.
Like a chase pack trying to close a gap, WMM officials elected to gain ground on the issue. The best tool at their disposal, aside from collective will, was money.
The six-race consortium, which is sponsored by pharmaceutical giant Abbott, announced a set of new anti-doping measures in February and March. The most important is the creation of a target pool of as many as 150 athletes and funding of increased out-of-competition testing. Targeted athletes will include those who have top results in majors; race entrants who have run sub-2-hour, 27-minute (women) and sub-2:11 (men) times elsewhere in the past three years; and those making major marathon debuts who have run under 1:09 (women) and 1:00 (men) in half-marathons. The program will be carried out in cooperation with the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field's international governing body.
WMM general counsel and London Marathon CEO Nick Bitel won't reveal how much the majors are spending except to say it is a "significant six-figure amount." The goal, he said, is to ensure that all contenders, regardless of their nationality or training locales, are subject to the same rigorous anti-doping controls. That investment is necessary in an era when resources and standards of professionalism among national anti-doping organizations vary wildly, Bitel said.
Boston marks the rollout of the new program. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which executes all IAAF testing in this country, will perform pre-competition testing on contenders there as well as the routine controls for top finishers. "It's obviously the right initiative," USADA CEO Travis Tygart said. "It's the type of insurance you need to protect your brand before the world."
On the other end of the food chain, WMM will pay out its series bonus in installments, $100,000 annually. That may not be a direct disincentive to dope, but it will mean that the series won't be out of pocket quite as much if an athlete is caught years after the fact, say, by biological passport findings or a retest of an old sample.
WMM already had a strict anti-doping policy in place, but New York Road Runners CEO Mary Wittenberg said the Jeptoo case made it clear race organizers had to take a more hands-on approach.
"We're all incredibly frustrated," said Wittenberg, whose organization owns the New York City Marathon. "We work hard to support athletes on the pro side, we make decisions about putting resources into athletes. When somebody cheats, it betrays other athletes, betrays the totality of the sport and our organization. This idea that we promote our athletes and then -- if, in the end, what we were watching wasn't real?
"We are painfully aware of how quickly we can lose it all."
Independent funding and/or testing programs by private event organizers are not unheard of. USA Cycling's RaceClean initiative is a collaboration between local associations and organizers who request testing at their events and share costs (on a matching funds basis) with the national federation.
Some individual road race organizers take it on themselves. Austin Marathon director John Conley said he will not offer prize money in his race without testing top finishers and did neither in his event for a number of years. In 2014, he reinstituted both, spending more than $3,000 on testing. That year's winner, Joseph Mutinda of Kenya, tested positive for steroids after the race and for EPO in a subsequent out-of-competition test and last month accepted a three-year suspension imposed by USADA. "You never want to see your champion disgraced, but I'm glad the process worked," Conley said.
The World Triathlon Corp., which owns the Ironman triathlon series, created an elite athlete pool and began funding additional testing 10 years ago. The initiative was spurred by the same kind of shock to its system -- the 2004 EPO bust of world champion Nina Kraft of Germany. There are roughly 90 athletes in the Ironman target pool at any given time, and in 2013, the last year for which statistics are available, 520 tests were conducted, half of them out of competition. Seven athletes are currently serving doping suspensions. Just as in the fledgling WMM program, Ironman athletes are also subject to testing by their national anti-doping agencies and/or sport federations.
Jeptoo's name has not yet been erased from the 2014 Chicago Marathon results, and Kenya's athletic federation has suspended the agents for her and other top Kenyan stars pending its investigation. Chicago race director Carey Pinkowski would only speak in general terms about his reaction, saying he had to be sensitive to the appeals process. "But if I were to say it didn't sting a little bit, if I wasn't disappointed, I wouldn't be relaying my feelings," he said. "We need to be leaders in addressing PEDs."
The only antidote to that sting is to try and sting back.